Succulents and More™

As you may know, quite a few of the plants we love and have growing in our gardens aren’t propagated vegetatively, through seeds or offsets, but start life in a lab. This includes not only many of my beloved agaves and mangaves, but also most commercially grown perennials and even the orchids you find in grocery stores and garden centers. And if you think plant tissue culture (micropropagation) is a relatively new thing, you might be surprised to find out that orchids have been tissue cultured on a large scale since the 1960s. Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to go on a field trip with my volunteer group from the UC Davis Arboretum Teaching Nursery to visit a plant tissue culture lab in the Sacramento area. I already had a high-level understanding of what tissue culture is and how it’s done, but I had never seen a lab in operation, so I was stoked to go. I read somewhere that a tissue culture lab is essentially a plant factory combined with a surgical operating room. That’s a ...

This is the continuation of my post about Bay Area artist Mat McGrath’s garden. Click here to see the front yard the way it looks right now, in late July 2026. I already showed you the photo below in part 1 , but it’s a great visual aid for orientation. The front yard is to the left of driveway, the slope on the right, and the back yard behind the van. To help you visualize where the different areas in the back yard are located, here’s the 2021 listing photo that shows what the property looked like when Mat and Mali bought it. Each area in question is circled in yellow. Just a couple of photos of the slope above the driveway (circled in yellow above): The next area is right behind the gate: The back yard has a multi-level terraced retaining wall on one side (on the right in the photos below). This gives Mat and Mali extra space — a lot of extra space. The planting area at ground level has gone through some significant changes. Mat has removed most of the soft-leaved succulents that u...